Quote of the day:
All people are born alike—except Republicans and Democrats.
—Groucho Marx
When I moved to Philadelphia in August of 1980, I had to give up my car (my sister ended up with the blue VW Rabbit) because the cost of living in Philly was so much higher than it had been in Harrisburg, and the new job wasn’t paying me any more more than I had been getting at the old job. Though, of course, there was the promise of advancement.
I was initially annoyed by the loss of the car as I had been so dependent on it, but it wasn’t long before I learned to adjust to the city and either walk or take a bus to wherever I needed to go. In short order I no longer missed the car.
And 20 years later when my workplace was moved to northeast Philly and I was forced to get a car again, I never really fully embraced car culture. So shortly after retiring, I got rid of the car and I haven’t looked back.
Now that I’m reading Henry Grabar’s Paved Paradise: How Parking Explains the World, I’m wondering how anybody survives the experience of owning a car.
It was a November afternoon in Queens and Jie Zou was looking for a parking spot. He pulled his white Audi in front of a space on Kissena Boulevard, by Rainbow Bakery, and prepared to back in. But Zong Li drove up behind him, angling for the same opening. It was a typical New York moment, a low-stakes impasse that has its own Seinfeld episode, until the men got out of their cars.
The argument escalated quickly. Zou punched Li in the face, and Zou’s passenger, Jonathan Zhang, produced a baseball bat, which he swung at Li and his companion. After Li wrested the bat away, Zou and Zhang got back into the Audi and pulled across the street. Li followed, smacking the bat on the hood of the Audi. Then Zou hit the accelerator. When the Audi hit Li, he flipped across the hood of the car. Zou kept driving, jumped the curb, and sent the sedan careening into Rainbow Bakery’s plate-glass window. The car ended up six feet into the shop, leaving shoppers lying in the shattered glass. Five people were taken to the hospital; Zou, who left the scene on foot, was later arrested and charged with assault.
John Lo, the owner of Rainbow Bakery, stood forlorn among the smashed display cases, bent wall studs, and Sheetrock dust of his store. “It’s just for a parking space,” he said in disbelief. It was his opening day.
The book is filled with anecdotes like that and there are lots of shout-outs to the Philly parking experience, which, as it turns out, is not necessarily the worst among the major cities, hard as it is for me to believe that.
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